Conventionally, there are many image pickup apparatuses, such as electronic cameras, which record and reproduce still images and moving images picked up by solid image pickup elements, such as CCD and CMOS, using memory cards including solid-state memory elements as a recording medium.
As an example of techniques related to these image pickup apparatuses, the non-patent literature 1 proposes an image pickup apparatus having a configuration providing a microlens array in front of a solid image pickup element such that each of lenses is arranged for a plurality of pixels (photoelectric conversion means). Such a configuration allows incident direction information of a light ray incident on the image pickup element to be acquired.
Use of such an image pickup apparatus allows not only generation of a normal photographed image based on an output signal from each pixel, but also reconstruction of an image which is focused at an arbitrary focal length by application of a predetermined image processing to a photographed image.